Time is ticking for the 450 insurers around the world to comply with the International Financial Reporting Standard 17 (IFRS 17) by January 1, 2021 for companies with their financial year starting on January 1.

Insurers are at different stages of preparation, ranging from performing gap analyses, to issuing requirements to software and consulting vendors, to starting the pilot phase with a new IFRS 17 system, with a few already embarking on implementing a full IFRS 17 system.

Unlike the banks, the insurance industry has historically spent less on large IT system revamps. This is in part due to the additional volume, frequency and variety of banking transactions compared to insurance transactions.

IFRS 17 is one of the biggest ‘people, process and technology’ revamp exercises for the insurance industry in a long while. The Big 4 firms have published a multitude of papers and videos on the Internet highlighting the impact of the new reporting standard on insurance contracts that was issued by the IASB in May 2017. In short, it is causing a buzz in the industry.

As efforts are focused on ensuring regulatory compliance to the new standard, insurers must also ask: “What other strategic value can be derived from our heavy investment in time, manpower and money in this whole exercise?”

The answer—analytics to gain deeper business insights.

One key objective of IFRS 17 is to provide information at a level of granularity that helps stakeholders assess the effect of insurance contracts on financial position, financial performance and cash flows, increasing transparency and comparability.

Most IFRS 17 systems in the market today achieves this by bringing the required data into the system, compute, report and integrate to the insurer’s GL system. From a technology perspective, such systems will comprise a data management tool, a data model, a computation engine and a reporting tool. However, most of these systems are not built to provide strategic value beyond pure IFRS 17 compliance.

Apart from the IFRS 17 data, an insurer can use this exercise to put in place an enterprise analytics platform that caters beyond IFRS 17 reporting, to broader and deeper financial analytics, to customer analytics, operational and risk analytics. To leverage on new predictive analytics technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, a robust enterprise data platform to house and make available large volumes of data (big data) is crucial.

Artificial Intelligence can empower important processes like claims analyses, asset management, risk calculation, and prevention. For instance, better forecasting of claims experience based on a larger variety and volume of real-time data. The same machine can be used to make informed decisions about investments based on intelligent algorithms, among other use cases.

As the collection of data becomes easier and more cost effective, Artificial Intelligence can drive whole new growths for the insurance industry.

The key is centralizing most of your data onto a robust enterprise platform to allow cross line of business insights and prediction.

As an insurer, if your firm has not embarked on such a platform, selecting a robust system that can cater to IFRS 17 requirements AND beyond will be a case of killing 2 birds with one stone.

FRG can help you and your teams get ready for IFRS 17. Contact us today for more information.

Tan Cheng See is Director of Business Development and Operations for FRG.